The C Art Trust Award 2023/2024
Kathy Barry
The recipient of the 2023/2024 award is Kathy Barry
Kathy Barry is based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. She has a MFA from Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland (2004) and a Postgraduate Diploma in Art History from Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington (2001).
Barry has been exhibiting since 2001, but her practice took its current turn in 2012, when she began producing watercolour drawings that captured the energy fields she began to see and feel that have structured the series she has produced since that date. Her works have been included in the 32nd Bienal de Sāo Paulo in 2016, and in Believe Not Every Spirit, But Try the spirits at Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) in Melbourne in 2015. She staged Homeworld, a two-person exhibition with Isobel Thom, at Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery in 2014, after completing the artist residency at McCahon House in West Auckland in 2012. Most recently, Barry was featured in Energy Work: Kathy Barry / Sarah Smuts-Kennedy (2022), curated by Christina Barton at Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery. This was her first substantial survey exhibition which gave visual form to intuited energy fields that exceed the human sensorium.
Search Engine for her Future Self, 2020-22
Installation view, Energy Work: Kathy Barry/Sarah Smuts-Kennedy, Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery, Victoria University of Wellington Te Herenga Waka, 2022.
Photo: Ted Whitaker
Search Engine for her Future Self, 2020-22
watercolour & graphite pencil on paper, 12 parts
700 × 720 mm each
Photo: Ted Whitaker
Search Engine for her Future Self, 2020-22
Installation view, Energy Work: Kathy Barry/Sarah Smuts-Kennedy, Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery, Victoria University of Wellington Te Herenga Waka, 2022.
Photo: Ted Whitaker
The Loom of Time, 2017-19
Installation view, Energy Work: Kathy Barry/Sarah Smuts-Kennedy, Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery, Victoria University of Wellington Te Herenga Waka, 2022.
Photo: Ted Whitaker
The Loom of Time, 2017-19
watercolour and graphite pencil on paper, 16 parts
700 × 720 mm each
Photo: Ted Whitaker
The Loom of Time, 2017-19
Installation view, Energy Work: Kathy Barry/Sarah Smuts-Kennedy, Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery, Victoria University of Wellington Te Herenga Waka, 2022.
Photo: Ted Whitaker
Kathy Barry: Within You Without You
Robert Leonard
I’d seen a few paintings by Kathy Barry around the galleries, but it wasn’t until I caught her show at Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington last year that I came to appreciate her work’s epic ambition and scope. Everything clicked.
The show was a two-hander with fellow traveller Sarah Smuts- Kennedy: Barry upstairs, Smuts-Kennedy down. With its metaphysical flavour, Energy Work wasn’t your typical Adam Art Gallery show. According to the press release, both artists ‘give visual form to intuited energy fields that exceed the human sensorium’, ‘connect us to the planet and to alternative dimensions of time and space’, and ‘decentre the human subject and sensitise us to a multi-dimensional universe’.
Barry showed three major series, each encompassing twelve framed watercolours: Twelve Energy Diagrams (2015), The Loom of Time (2018–9), and Search Engine for Her Future Self (2020–2). There were also some earlier watercolours (from which the series had evolved) and a video, Twelve Minute Movement (2016). This is the preponderance of the work Barry has produced over the last ten years. The show was her biggest outing yet.
The watercolours have a common format. Each is around 700mm square—not big, not small. Barry rules up an irregular pencil grid, then colours in its polygon compartments, usually leaving some unpainted—white paper. Each shard has qualities of hue, scale, and direction. We oscillate between reading them as individuals and experiencing them cumulatively, as an energised field. The effect recalls looking through those sheets of fancy patterned glass that refract light, suggesting larger shapes and logics may be embedded, lurking behind the chaotic dazzle. Combining the high-tech and the handmade, the works explore a variety of effects. In trying to describe them, I resort to metaphors. I talk about speed and saturation; frequency, fracture, and dilation; radio static, magnetic fields, and interference patterns. Seeing them in series makes me alert to subtle shifts in emphasis and tuning.
There’s a play between the delicate, modest nature of the watercolour medium and the juggernaut ambition of Barry’s project. Watercolour is a tough medium for this brand of hard- edged geometric abstraction. It’s time consuming and unforgiving. It demands precision—no room for mistakes. When you look at Barry’s paintings, you can’t help but consider the grinding labour and concentration involved in the making in contrast to the immediacy and vitality of the effect.
Barry’s works could be taken at face value, as appealing geometric abstractions, but there’s a backstory that prompts us to look deeper. In 2012, while on a McCahon House residency, Barry had a road-to-Damascus experience, an awakening of sorts, and everything changed. She explains: ‘I softened my gaze. I felt energy, pulsating light-yellow energy, coming into me. I became aware of other presences in the room. They inhabited my body and showed me what to do.’
Barry let go of ideas of artistic agency and intentionality—the backbone of her art-school training. Since then, she has produced work that is ‘100-percent guided’, with every decision directed by those external presences, bit by bit by bit. She’s no longer ‘conceptualising’ or ‘problem solving’. ‘I took the visual language I was working with and infused it with something else, an intelligence that was beyond myself’, she says. To casual viewers, perhaps her work didn’t change so much, but, for her, its logic, the experience of making it, and its purpose were utterly new.
Barry’s watercolours represent energy fields and are energy fields. When I observe that she doesn’t use curves or spirals, she quickly corrects me, explaining that most of the works are based on spirals, on looking down through a spiral, a vortex. She explains: ‘At any given time, I'm aware of the key energy centres in my body. I feel energy coming through in a strong spiralling current—the chakras are experienced like rotational energy vortexes.’
The art is just a part of a wider project. In addition to her paintings, Barry does healing energy-activation work on herself and on others—all of it guided. At the Adam, the video shows her doing energy work in the form of a performance, indicating this wider context. ‘For years, my practice has entailed a full day in the studio and then almost the same amount of time after dinner, doing energy-activation work sometimes until 3am in the morning’, she says. ‘I've worked on many people in the art world, including writers and curators— you would be surprised’.
Barry’s project is a big commitment, and it required a major change in lifestyle. She gave up her Massey University art-school teaching job and sold her house to pursue it. ‘I let go of a lot to focus on the work. I gave myself over completely to something that wants to be articulated. I lived precariously. It’s been lonely’, she says. For a while, she was itinerant, a housesitter, but these days she flats with her dealer, Jenny Neligan of Bowen Galleries.
It can take Barry over two months to complete a single painting, and over two years to make a series. The work’s long- haul exegesis requires monklike discipline. Barry works in a small quiet studio in Wellington City Council’s Toi Pōneke studio complex, largely free from distractions. The set up is simple. She works on one painting at a time. When she finishes it, she puts it away and begins the next. She paints sitting at a table, with the paper taped to a board, propped up on an angle. When I visit her in January, a new work is coming to life. She’s applying the first colour—filling in all the red bits.
Introducing Barry’s work in a talk, Adam Art Gallery Director Tina Barton was anxious to distance her practice both from early modernist abstraction and from postmodernism, saying it lay outside both traditions. Clearly, it isn’t ironic postmodernism, but it does resonate with the metaphysical ambitions of early modernist painting, when Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian, and Co. were informed by spiritualism and theosophy. Indeed, Barry’s paintings conjure up all manner of modern-art precedents. I tick boxes: pointillism, cubism, orphism, futurism, vorticism ... op art. But I take Barton’s point. Barry’s work doesn’t seem to be looking back to them. It’s not quoting them, not leaning on them. It doesn’t need art history.
That said, Barry’s work does find precedents in three recently discovered pioneer woman abstractionists, who were spiritualists and mystics: from Britain, Georgiana Houghton (1814–84); from Sweden, Hilma af Klint (1862–1944); and, from Switzerland, Emma Kunz (1892–1963). None was recognised in their day, but today are the talk of the art world. Their examples simultaneously erase and enrich the received wisdom of art history. Barry relates to Houghton, with her swirling energy fields; to af Klint, who painted her large instructive cycles under instructions from the High Masters; and to Kunz, who developed symmetrical square-format geometries on graph paper during healing sessions with patients.
Barry’s paintings are about conducting new energy, new consciousness, into the world. She describes them as charts, teaching aids, healing tools. What do we make of her insistence that she’s stepped aside and that others are calling the shots? Even as the art scene embraces the idea of ‘the death of the author’, it clings to an idea of art as the product of individual artistic intention and sensibility. So, if we take her at her word, are Barry’s works ‘art’? Does it even matter? Perhaps her project transcends art, its contexts and histories, becoming something bigger.
Until the Adam show, Barry had a fairly low profile locally, although she had enjoyed a few star turns offshore. Her work featured in Believe not Every Spirit, but Try the Spirits, at Melbourne’s Monash University Museum of Art in 2015 (placing her alongside Houghton), and in the 2016 Sao Paolo Biennale. She has sold a few individual works, but is anxious to keep her big series together. They aren’t intended for domestic consumption, but for the world.
Barry is serious and she’s careful with her words. She is disdainful of faddish new agers and hates talk of mediums and channelling. To her, that suggests communing with the dead— which, she says, has nothing to do with anything. While some will be sceptical of her claims, her work is undeniably compelling. It excites us regardless—it hums. As Barry says, ‘The energies described in the work are from the universe, and then there is energy that the body emits. You don't have to believe it, you are simply in it, of it, and are it.’
12 Energy Diagrams, 2015-16
watercolour and graphite pencil on paper, 12 parts
700 × 720 mm each
Photo: Ted Whitaker
12 Energy Diagrams, 2015 -16
watercolour and graphite pencil on paper, 12 parts
700 × 720 mm each
12 Energy Diagrams, 2015-16
Installation view, Energy Work: Kathy Barry/Sarah Smuts-Kennedy, Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery, Victoria University of Wellington Te Herenga Waka, 2022.
Photo: Ted Whitaker
Dimensional Ecologies, 2013
watercolour and graphite pencil on paper
700 × 720 mm
Epic Whirlpool, 2012, Star Witness, 2013, AION A, 2013, and Dimensional Ecologies, 2013.
Installation view, Energy Work: Kathy Barry / Sarah Smuts-Kennedy, Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery, Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, 2022. Photo: Ted Whitaker
Star Witness, 2013
watercolour and graphite pencil on paper
609 × 705 mm
Kathy Barry – Curriculum vitae
Education
2002 – 2004 Master of Fine Arts, Honours. Elam School of Fine Arts, The University of Auckland.
2000 – 2001 Post-Graduate Diploma in Art History. Victoria University of Wellington Te Herenga Waka.
1988 – 1991 Bachelor of Fine Arts (Sculpture major). Elam School of Fine Arts, The University of Auckland.
Selected Exhibitions
2024 Disguise the Limit: John Yau’s Collaborations. University of Kentucky Art Museum, Lexington KY, USA. 9 January – 1 June. Touring to the Schneider Museum of Art in Ashland, Oregon and the Hanes Art Gallery at Wake Forest University, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Upcoming
2022 Energy Work: Kathy Barry / Sarah Smuts-Kennedy. Curated by Tina Barton. Te Pat ā ka Toi Adam Art Gallery, Victoria University of Wellington Te Herenga Waka. 13 July – 2 October.
2021 About Time. Bowen Galleries. 5 October – 31 October.
Flat Earthers. Curated by Raewyn Martyn. The Engine Room, Whiti o Rehua School of Art, College of Creative Arts, Massey University, Wellington. 13 – 27 July.
2020 Spaced Out , Bowen Galleries Window. 24 July – 6 August.
Toi Pōneke Residents Exhibition , Toi Pōneke Arts Centre, Wellington. 6 – 16 June.
2019 The 28 th Annual Wallace Art Awards. The Arts House Trust, Pah Homestead, Auckland. 3 September – 10 November.
Parkin Drawing Prize. New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts, Wellington. 6 August – 8 September.
Erasing Code Worlds. Bowen Galleries, Wellington. 1 April – 5 May.
2017 Midway: a Collectif Génération collaborationn by John Yau and Kathy Barry. The Chartwell Gallery, Objectspace, Auckland. 30 September – 19 November.
Transmission. Bowen Galleries, Wellington. 20 February – 11 March.
On Paper: Drawings from the Wallace Arts Trust. The Arts House Trust, Pah Homestead. 17 January – 26 February.
2016 INCERTEZA VIVA (Live Uncertainty) 32 nd Bienal de São Paulo. Curated by Jochen Volz, Gabi Ngcobo, Júlia Rebouças, Lars Bang Larsen and Sofía Olascoaga. With assistance by Fundação Bienal de São Pãulo and Creative New Zealand, Arts Council of New Zealand Toi Aotearoa. Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, Ibirapuera Park, São Paulo. 7 September – 11 December.
2015 Space Echo. Bowen Galleries, Wellington. 28 September – 18 October.
Believe Not Every Spirit, But Try the Spirits. Curated by Lars Bang Larsen and Marco Pasi. With Georgiana Houghton, Yuri Ancarani, Jan Bäcklund, Belle Bassin, Vincent Ceraudo, Mikala Dwyer, Max Ernst, Madame Favre, Chiara Fumai, Diena Georgetti, Madge Gill, Tamar Guimarães & Kasper Akhøj, Susan Hiller, Susan Jacobs, Jess Johnson, Kristine Kemp, Joachim Koester, David Lamelas, Dane Mitchell, Matt Mullican, Olivia Plender, Lea Porsager, Laurent Schmid, Georgina Starr and Dorothea Tanning. Monash University Museum of Art / MUMA, Melbourne. 22 April – 27 June.
2014 Homeworld: Kathy Barry and Isobel Thom. Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery, Auckland. 6 December 2014 – 4 February 2015.
2013 Tickets to the Paper World. Bowen Galleries, Wellington. 11 March – 6 April.
National Contemporary Art Award. Waikato Museum, Hamilton. 16 August – 10 November.
2012 Summer Show. Antoinette Godkin Gallery, Auckland. December 2012 – January 2013.
Tickets to the Paper World: McCahon House Post Residency Exhibition. Corbans Estate Art Centre (CEAC), Waitākere City. 16 November – 20 January 2013.
Group Show: Alexandra Kennedy, David Morrison, Esther Leigh, Geoffrey Heath, Kathy Barry, Lianne Edwards, Miranda Parkes, Monique Jansen. Antoinette Godkin Gallery, Auckland. 4 May – 9 June.
Quattro: Monique Jansen, Kathy Barry, Alexandra Kennedy and Sarah Munro. Antoinette Godkin Gallery, Auckland. 22 February – 22 March.
2011 Auckland Art Fair. The Cloud, Auckland Waterfront. 4 August – 7 August. Billboard series, Victoria Street West, Auckland.
Paper, Gold, Silver. Bowen Galleries, Wellington. 16 March – 2 April.
Ensolite. Bowen Galleries Window, Wellington.
Folded Room/Paths Crossing. RM Gallery, Artist Project Space, Auckland. 10 – 26 March.
2010 Invisible Ink: A Drawing Installation. Bowen Galleries Window, Wellington.
Porchlight, Recent Paintings. Bowen Galleries, Wellington. 10 – 28 May.
CoCA Anthony Harper Award for Contemporary Art. CoCA Centre of Contemporary Art Toi Moroki, Christchurch.
2009 Happy the World so Made, Kathy Barry and Sarah Munro. Snowhite Gallery, UNITEC School of Design, Auckland. 30 March – 17 April.
2008 Fold-up, works on paper. Room 103 Gallery, Artist Project Space, Auckland.
The Pretty Show. Group show with Julien Dyne, Alexandra Kennedy, Marie Lelievre, Maurice Lye, Annie Mackenzie, Mirabel Oliver and Justine Walker. High Street Project, Artist Project Space, Christchurch. 3-18 December.
National Drawing Award. Artspace Aotearoa, Auckland. 29 November – 20 December. The Physics Room, Christchurch. 21 January – 7 February 2009.
The 17 th Annual Wallace Art Awards (Jury Award winner). The Aotea Centre, Auckland. The Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt. 11 October – 3 February 2009.
2006 The Drawing Show. The Engine Room, Whiti o Rehua School of Art, College of Creative Arts, Massey, Wellington.
Norsewear Art Award. Hawke’s Bay Exhibition Centre, Hastings. 2 April – 14 May.
2004 Irma’s Throat, A Paper Installation. Masters Graduation Exhibition, Elam School of Fine Arts, The University of Auckland.
2002 Botanica. Originated by the Adam Art Gallery Te Pat ā ka Toi, curated by Zara Stanhope. The Gus Fisher Gallery, The Kenneth Myers Centre, The University of Auckland. 13 July – 31 August.
2001 Surprise , A Christmas Exhibition. Curated by Rebecca Wilson, Michael Hirschfeld Gallery, City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi. 14 December – 14 January 2001.
Botanica. Curated by Zara Stanhope. With Nancy Adams, Catherine Bagnall, Ross Blackner, Nigel Brown, Lillian Budd, Audrey Eagle, Graham Fletcher, Tim Galloway, Simryn Gill, Niki Hastings-McFall, Christine Hellyar, J. Bruce Irwin, Megan Jenkinson, Maureen Lander, Christopher Langton, Colin McCahon, T.A McCormack, Tim Maguire, Bill Malcolm, Karl Maughan, Anne Noble, B. Parker, Sydney Parkinson, Tania Patterson, Peter Peryer, Ann Robinson, Willa Rogers, Michael Shepherd, Robyn Stacey, Margaret Stones, Kelly Thompson, Keith West, Boyd Webb and Sue Williams. Te Pat ā ka Toi Adam Art Gallery, Victoria University of Wellington Te Herenga Waka. 11 August – 7 October.
2000 Practicing Beauty. Catherine Bagnall, Kathy Barry, Emma Febvre-Richards and Maddie Leach. Michael Hirschfeld Gallery, City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi. 28 July – 27 August.
Bibliography
Bang Larsen, Lars and Marco Pasi (eds). “Interview with Kathy Barry and Lars Bang Larsen” in Georgiana Houghton. Essays by Lars Bang Larsen, Marco Pasi, Jeff Stewart, Simon Grant, Rachel Oberter, Iris Muller Westmann. Published by MUMA, Melbourne and Fulgar Press, Lopen, Somerset (UK). 2024.
Barton, Christina (ed) Energy Work: Kathy Barry / Sarah Smuts-Kennedy. Essays by Robyn Maree Pickens, Jennifer Higgie, Marcus Moore, Natasha Conland, Adam Greener. Published by Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery at Victoria University of Wellington Te Herenga Waka. Exhibition Photography by Ted Whitaker. Design by Alice Bonifant. 2023
Leonard, Robert. “Within You Without You”. Here & Now , No. 17/Late Summer 2023, pp. 42 - 46.
Emil, McAvoy. “Kathy Barry: Dimensional Ecologies”. Artnews New Zealand, Winter 2022, pp. 68 - 73.
Moore, Marcus. “Looking Beyond the Ferris Wheel, Search Engine for her Future Self”. Flat Earthers: Unpleasant Truths/Comfortable Lies , Exhibition print publication & E-Publication, http://flatearthers.space. Edited by Raewyn Martyn and John Lake, design by Kerry Ann Lee, 2021.
Neupane, Maya. “Kathy Barry’s Erasing Code Worlds”. Salient, Issue 07, Volume 82, April 2019, p. 37.
Darragh, Judy and Imogen Taylor (eds). Femisphere, Edition #2. 2019.
Hurrell, John. “Collaborating Artists’ Books”, Eyecontact, 18 October 2017. http://eyecontactsite.com
Yau, John, “Visual Magic ” and Gregory O’Brien, “Air space and wind harp – Kathy Barry’s drawings for Midway”. Midway: a Collectif Génération collaboration by John Yau & Kathy Barry. Objectspace, Auckland, 2017.
Jassaud, Gervais. “Midway. John Yau and Kathy Barry”. Gervais Jassaud – Artists books publisher as auteur. Web. www.gervaisjassaud.net. 2017.
Feeney, Warren. “Auckland gallery Objectspace setting its sights on expansion”. Stuff.co.nz. Web. 10.03.17.
Volz, Jochen, Júlia Rebouças, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Gabi Ngcobo, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Lars Bang Larsen and Elizabeth Povinelli. INCERTEZA VIVA/Live Uncertainty. Exhibition catalogue. Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil. 2016.
Kryger, Mathias. “With the Eyes Deep in the Mud”. Kunstkritikk. Web. 15.09.2016.
Pasi, Marco. “ The Hidden Hand”. Tate Etc. magazine. ipad App. Issue 37, Summer 2016.
Gardiner, Sue. “In Search of the the Otherworldly”. Artnews New Zealand, Autumn 2016, pp.100-103.
Bang Larsen, Lars. “ New Forms of Agency”. Spike Art Quarterly, Vienna/Berlin, Issue 46 Winter 2015, pp. 50-57.
Bang Larsen, Lars and Marco Pasi. Believe Not Every Spirit, But Try the Spirits. Exhibition catalogue. Monash University Museum of Art/MUMA, Melbourne, 2015.
Hanfling, Edward. “Exhibitions/Auckland. Homeworld: Kathy Barry and Isobel Thom”, Art New Zealand, Number 153/ Autumn 2015, p.37.
Hurrell, John. “Thom and Barry at Te Uru”. EyeContact, 23 January, 2015. http://eyecontactsite.com
Bryant, Jan. Homeworld. Exhibition catalogue. Design by Clouds Publishing. 2014.
Gardiner, Sue. “Let’s talk about abstraction”. Artnews New Zealand, Winter, 2012, pp. 88-93.
Hurrell, John. “The Edges of Geometry”. EyeContact, 2012. http://eyecontactsite.com
McNamara, TJ. “From the sublime to the meticulous”. New Zealand Herald, 4.03. 2012.
Sanderson, Pippa. “Drawn to Paint: Materiality and transcendence in the work of Kathy Barry”. Art New Zealand, Number 137, Autumn 2011, pp. 66-67.
Amery, Mark. “Furiously Competing Dissolving Grids”. EyeContact, 2010. http://eyecontactsite.com
Hurrell, John.“Unitec Show”. EyeContact, 2009. http://eyecontactartforum.blogspot.co.nz
Pickens, Robyn. “Snap to grid”. Happy the World so Made. Exhibition Catalogue. Snowhite Gallery, UNITEC School of Design. 2009.
Barnett, Rod, et al. Botanica. Exhibition catalogue. Te Patāka Toi Adam Art Gallery, Victoria University of Wellington Te Herenga Waka, 2001.
Residencies and Awards
Visual Arts Residency, Vermont Studio Center. Vermont, United States of America. June - August 2012.
17 th Artist-in-Residence, Parehuia McCahon House Artists’ Residency. Auckland. February - May 2012.
Collections
Ngā Puhipuhi o Te Herenga Waka, Victoria University of Wellington Te Herenga Waka Art Collection.
The Koopman Collection, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, National Library of the Netherlands.
Sir George Grey Special Collections, Heritage Collection Auckland Libraries.
The University of Auckland Art Collection.
Wellington City Council Art Collection.
The Collection of the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
The Arts House Trust.
The Suter Collection, The Suter Art Gallery Te Aratoi o Whakatū.
Teaching
Kathy Barry has taught contextual studies, art history and theory, and studio-based papers at The Elam School of Fine Arts, The University of Auckland; UNITEC School of Visual Arts and Design, Auckland and Whiti o Rehua School of Art, College of Creative Arts, Massey University, Wellington.